Hypoxia Confers Tumor with a Higher Immune Infiltration but Lower Mutation Burden in Gastrointestinal Cancer

Hypoxia is one of the driving forces of cancer progression, recurrence, and metastasis. However, the association between the tumor hypoxic tumor microenvironment and the tumor mutation burden (TMB) is poorly understood in gastrointestinal cancer.

Approximately 2,000 samples from colorectal cancer (CRC) and stomach adenocarcinoma (STAD) patients were obtained from the gene expression omnibus database and the cancer genome Atlas databases and were clustered and subtyped by nonnegative matrix factorization. Significant differentially expressed genes that were possibly related to survival differences between the hypoxic and normoxic groups were subjected to multivariate Cox regression.

Gastrointestinal cancer patients with CRC and STAD were further divided into two subgroups, namely, the hypoxia group and the normoxia group, and hypoxia was correlated with unfavorable outcomes. Notably, hypoxic tumors had lower TMB but significantly higher levels of immune and stromal infiltration. A signature of HEYL and NRP1 selected by LASSO classified gastrointestinal cancer patients into either a low or high-risk group, allowing for the combination of TMB status with markers of hypoxia in future clinical applications.

Hypoxia is an independent prognostic factor and a strong immune infiltration indicator in gastrointestinal tumors of different organs, especially for cancers with low TMB.